[xiaomai]

I get why people do this. I used to use Freshbooks for my billing. They include tracking pixels in their emails, so I could see if a client had opened their invoice or not. If a client was late, I could adjust my behavior based on that tracking pixel (if they hadn't seen it, I would just send the invoice again vs. calling and trying to hound down a payment).

That said, I don't like the idea of tracking pixels either. I turn off images in gmail/thunderbird so that people can't track my reading. Would love it if the move to get rid of these became mainstream.

[amluto]

The Gmail image setting is all wrong, though — it also blocks inline images.

The correct solution is trivial if Google cared to implement it: never load remote content in emails. If Google did this, then people would stop including remote content. Problem solved.

[b3morales]

This is a valid use case, and it's a service you can get with snail mail, by sending it as "certified". Except for the fact that emails aren't particularly private, it seems reasonable that the same thing could exist for important emails. But if so, the fact that it's tracked should be as clearly exposed to the recipient as the certified snail mail envelope. Although that might not be possible to implement on top of email.

[aaomidi]

Most USPS mail carriers aren’t actually doing the proper “certified mail” operations. And especially so since COVID.

[b3morales]

What does that have to do with anything?

[lzooz]

You don't like the idea of it but you admit that you used them because they were useful to you.

[xiaomai]

To be clear, I didn't opt-in to using them. They were just there. But yes, the point of my post was that they were indeed useful (and I still don't like them).